FICTION

By GORONWY REES All Hands. By H. M. Tomlinson. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) We Are Not Alone. By James Hilton. (Macmillan. 6s.) Camilla, or The Fanatic Heart. By Ralph Ricketts. (Lovat

Dickson. 7s. 6d.)

The Brittlesnaps. By Edward A. Hibbitt. (Duckworth. 7s. 6d.) Man of December. By Alfred Neumann. (Hutchinson. 8s.)

A REVIEWER should be able to say what standards he proposes to adopt for criticising each novel. To say that Mr. Witt Among the Rebels is good hardly indicates how far it is above the majority of novels that appear ; to attempt to do so would drive one into superlatives. There should be a sharp distinction between novels and fiction, as between books that have any pretensions to be works of art and those that have not. Then we should know where we were. Mr. Sender's book would be in the first class, the others on this list in the second. The scene of Mr. Witt is laid in Cartagena, in the South of Spain,

which, after the fall of King Amadeus' monarchy in 1873, became the' capital of the Federalist Republic established in Murcia. The story relates the attempts of the Federalists to defend their Republic against the expeditions sent to crush them on land and at sea by the Centralist Government at Madrid. The events of the Revolution are seen through the eyes of Mr. Witt, an English engineer at the Arsenal, an intelligent and liberal man but bewildered by the affronts offered to his intelligence by the rebellion of soldiers and peasants. He sees the rebellion reflected in the simple and passionate nature of his Spanish wife, Milagritos. In her and in the rebellion he finds evidence that there are some forces in life scarcely to be comprehended and mastered by an English Victorian Liberal.

Mr. Witt is no doubt a symbolical figure, and he serves the first purpose of a symbol, which is to give greater and more concrete reality to things otherwise inexpressible. Like a true symbol also, he is ambiguous, many-sided and elusive.

A Liberal, in love with his wife, he sympathises with the rebels ; a scientist, jealous of his wife and suspicious of her relations with her dead cousin, the poet and revolutionary, Carvajal, and with the rei olutionary leaders, he wishes them to fail ; and the war between his intelligence and his instincts• leads him inevitably to an act of treachery. His actions become irrational when dictated by motives of guilt, jealousy and suspicion no longer comprehensible to him. Mr. Sender shows his situation with astonishing sympathy, in lights that reveal him now as comic, now lovable, now admirable, now pathetic.

I believe I have seen Mr. Sender described as the young Tolstoy of Spain ; and indeed it is of the young Tolstoy of

the Sebastopol Tales that he sometimes reminds us in his descriptions of physical life. He has the same enjoyment of it, the same fresh, almost naive, response to it. One other gift they have in common, that of seeing men's moral responses and qualities as directly as if they were the colour of their hair

or the shape of their noses. It is a gift very different from psychological insight, and even rarer ; and it is perhaps the gift which justifies the novel as a form of art as opposed merely to a form of entertainment. It is the one talent which makes the novel creative, for in life men are no more all morally differentiated than they are all handsome ; it is a status they only achieve in the imagination, yet one to which they all tend. Because the novel can give men this status, as no other art can, it has a claim on our intelligence equal to that of music, poetry or painting. For the same reason it is perhaps the art of an individualist era, ready to die when it is over and

another is born in which not individuals but groups are the subjects of experience. But we hope that neither Mr. Sender nor the individualist era is dead yet.

From Mi. Sender, who is a novelist, we descend to the writers of fiction, Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Hilton, and Mr. Ricketts, all ready to waste an afternoon for us more or less pleasantly. They also concern themselves with moral issues, but with issues merely, and not with moral qualities that

belong to a man as indivisibly as his navel. All Hands is an

epic of the sea, of the nobility of simple seafaring men, who bring an unlucky ship from Java to London, Sicily, and

through a hurricane in the Atlantic, carrying as -passengers a famous scientist and his daughter. Mi. Tonilinson catches something of the reflected glory of Conrad and the sea itself, but has little of his own ; his style seems to me a model of the faux bon : " Above the greaser, the spaciousness was that of the lofty indistinction of an evening cathedral, though here the half seen shapes appeared not to be righteous." Such sen- tences are the prerogative of the self-conscious stylist ; Mr. Hilton, in his own way, can match them. " The streets of Calderbury were mostly steep and cobbled, and he rode along them with a degree of peril well orchestrated by experience." What is the sense of " orchestrated " here ?

In such a manner, with elaborate brevity and simplicity, Mr. Hilton tells a story of the injustice done to a country doctor, known as " the little doctor," who in 1899 began to practise in the cathedral town of Calderbury. He was gentle, diffident, intelligent ; we know that because Mr. Hilton says so several times. He is a passive saint in the service of medicine, with a dominating wife and neurotic son. He befriends and falls in love with a German dancing girl in a touring company, but their love is unspoken until tragedy releases it ; for by a chapter of accidents both he and she are arrested and though wildly innocent executed for the murder of his wife. Mr. Hilton tells this brief story with a love of goodness, a deliberate modesty, that are beyond my powers to describe, and with such conscious artfulness that one almost smiles as at a small boy who performs a conjuring trick which will never deceive however much he wave* his hands to show he has nothing up his sleeves.

Mr. Hilton's theme is Injustice ; Mr. Ricketts' Love. Camilla was an aristocratic girl who after a marriage that ended in divorce is disillusioned with society and falls in love with a young musician of subversive views who next to his Art loved Humanity. Their love is on a large scale ; it redeemed him from promiscuity (" I went to the last ditch," he says) and to her gave a grasp of higher values. " Love laid the foundation for a genuine appreciation of art and music." The life of the young and rich Lord Scarlan took a different course from Camilla's ; for, married to a selfish and ambitious wife, his philanthropic instincts became repressed and he developed into a jaundiced Young Tory. The two stories have a moral ; they meet at intervals and finally in the mine belonging to Lord Scarlan's father ; the young musician volunteers his help in a pit disaster. Camilla, watching, is killed by a stone thrown at Lord Scarlan's father by a young miner. John, in his eyes " a concentrated empti- ness," leaves England to serve in a leper hospital. Mr. Ricketts, as the blurb says, undoubtedly knows his world 3 and he has a considerable talent for observation. Indeed his characters and their emotions appear to be taken directly from life ; those who know their world as well as Mr. Ricketts may be able to recognise them. But his gift for observation is overlaid with so much priggishness that it fails to earn him the credit it deserves.

The Brittlemcips is a far better book than any of these except Mr. Sender's. It should be read by everyone who enjoys a feat perfectly performed and who wishes to know the exact truth about an important section of society. It is entirely-without pretentiousness or exaggeration, and succeeds precisely in what it intends to 'do : to describe typical lives of the working class and lower middle class. In the manner of Mr. Dos Passos, it tells the stories of four different groups of people, a family with father and son on the dole, an agent for correspondence courses, a clerk in an office, an incipient business crook. There are none of the excitements and embroideries usually thought necessary to 'fiction ; the dry unremitting accuracy, which never goes wrong, never misses a point, never aspires to anything but to tell the truth, may be too much for many people. That is their fault, or the truth's, but not Mr. Hibbitt's. These short sentences, each with its point, each hitting a nail unemphatically on the head, compose a terrible account of lives thwarted and constricted, of seediness and shabbiness, the thin stale smell of poverty ; the final effect has the authenticity of a scientific treatise.

The worst book on this list is Man of December, a rhapsodical account of Napoleon HI and the fall of the Second Empire, which- tries to help history hy inflating it. It is the Book Society --Choft-e--for April and iS--dittife4- unreadable.